This latency has been one of the biggest hurdles in developing a cure.

"Waking up" the virus and then destroying it - the so-called "kick-and-kill" approach - is a promising strategy for ridding patients of HIV.

Bionor's approach involves an anti-cancer drug called romidepsin to wake up the dormant HIV, and a vaccine called Vacc-4x to prime the body's own immune T-cells to recognise and destroy the virus.

"After an activation of the virus, which would normally lead to detectable virus in the blood, Vacc-4x ensured killing of the virus-producing cells to maintain non-detectable or very low levels of virus in the blood in 15 out of 17 patients," said Fischer Ravn.

No-one has yet been cured of Aids.

Thirty-nine million people have died of Aids, according to UN estimates, and about 35 million are living with the immune system-destroying virus today, overwhelmingly in poor countries.